Remember the moment you first met your spouse and thought, "He (or she) is perfect! There's nothing I wouldn't want to change about him (or her)."
And then a few months after marriage, you find yourself trying to change practically everything about your spouse that doesn't suit your needs.
The biggest mistake we can make about changing human behavior is the notion that we have some form of control over the change and transformation of others. This doesn't just apply in marriage, but also in parenting, counselling, discipleship and even work.
The sooner we realise that we can't change people, the sooner we take that unnecessary load off our backs of being a person's source of change.
When we start asking people to change for us, it doesn't reveal the holes in their personality of character. It reveals ours. Why? Most often, when we ask our spouses and other people to change we ask them to adjust to our needs, our wants and our preferences. In other words, we want them to fit into our selfish mould of expectations.
There is only one person who can bring lasting and complete change for the better—that's God. Ezekiel 36:26-27 tells us, "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules."
There are two things we can learn from this scripture. First, God has the power to bring about inside-out change in us that will make us better people. Second, we are assigned to desire and pray for the change and transformation of one person only—and that's ourselves.
How many times have you prayed, "Lord, please change my spouse," and how often do we pray "Lord, change me"? I love the heart of David when He said in Psalm 51:10, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."
This was David's prayer after he committed the sin of adultery and murder. David could have gone around blaming other people—Bathsheba for taking a bath in public, his servants for not refusing to call Bathsheba or his commanders for agreeing to put Uriah in the front lines. But He didn't. He took full responsibility and asked God to change Him.
In situations where there is conflict or trial in our marriages, our heart should not be to change things we have no control over—our spouses, our situations, or God—but to have God change our hearts. When God changes us, we will find that there is more peace and righteousness in experiencing change ourselves instead of imposing change on others.
